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Reviewed: The Lady Vanishes by BBC1

One gathers that The Lady Vanishes had been gathering dust at the back of the BBC drama cupboard for quite a while until its screening this month – it was originally supposed to be shown last Christmas – and now I’ve watched it, I can see why. They might have got away with it on Boxing Day afternoon, when its audience would have been fat and farty and more than usually easily pleased. But on a cold and clear-eyed Sunday night in March? Not on your life.

I bet plenty of those who started watching it soon flipped over to ITV’s much-hyped film about the Queen – a documentary that revealed, among other things, that the royal household subscribes to Majesty magazine. (The more I think about this, the more it seems like one of the best facts ever; slip off her crown and isn’t HM basically Alan Titchmarsh – with longer vowels?) If I hadn’t been reviewing this, I would have done exactly the same.

A remake must have seemed like a great idea at the time. You can very well imagine the innocent enthusiasm at the commissioning meeting. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film, The Lady Vanishes, which was based on the novel The Wheel Spinsby Ethel Lina White, is a marvellous confection, all camp thrills and derring-do. No one who has seen it ever forgets the cricket-obsessed young men, Charters and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford), who are rushing back to England from the Balkans in order to see the Test match. Except . . . yes, the people who made this version – it was written by Fiona Seres and directed by Diarmuid Lawrence – did forget them. Or at any rate, they left them out. Why? I’m damned if know.

All I can tell you is that this was a bizarrely pared down version of The Lady Vanishes, its silliest corners ruthlessly eliminated in favour of its central plot. Which would be fine if its plot – a seemingly daffy woman called Miss Froy is taken hostage on a steam train by villains unknown –wasn’t so silly in itself. Throw too much weight on it, as Seres did, and all you will hear is the loud creaking it makes as it turns. (Had she gone back to the novel? I’m not sure; I haven’t read it. But if she had, it was naughty to bait the viewer with Hitchcock’s superior title.)

But perhaps we shouldn’t get too bogged down in the plot and the various tedious ways it had been modified. That could take some time. The performances were universally lovely, which made it seem all the sadder that the writing was so dull and the mechanics so laboured. Gathered on our trans-European express to Trieste and beyond were some fine actors, hamming it up with great verve, gusto and, well, brio.

Keeley Hawes was fabulous as the cynical Laura Parminter, the ennui wafting from her in great, powerful waves (I almost fancied I could smell it, rising noxiously above the Fracas or the Jicky). Alex Jennings played a character called the Professor and he was predictably lovable; his quizzical, period face might have been made for horn-rimmed spectacles. Gemma Jones and Stephanie Cole put in expert turns as bitchy spinster sisters, Evelyn and Rose Flood-Porter, who fell on every morsel of gossip as if on a bridge roll. Selina Cadell was Miss Froy, her eyes like marbles about to roll from her head. Pip Torrens was the Reverend Kenneth Barnes and he – Torrens, I mean – is never anything less than hilarious, always looking as if he has just swallowed a frog.

In the lead role as the beautiful Iris Carr – it’s the spoiled but plucky Iris who notices Miss Froy no longer appears to be on the train –was Tuppence Middleton. She had an awful lot to do, for all the reasons I’ve already explained, so it was hardly her fault if she sometimes seemed weary both of her role and of Max (Tom Hughes), the hungry-looking young man who kept thrusting his cheekbones at her whenever they were alone in her compartment. She has, as they say, a long career ahead of her – and with a name like Tuppence, I’d be willing to bet good money (ha ha) that she will soon be a big star.

Bertie Carvel's diary: What would the French think about infidelity to Doctor Foster?

According to the adage, the first thing an actor does when he gets a job is to go on holiday. And so, having finished our sold-out run of James Graham’s Ink at the Almeida and with the show (in which I play a young Rupert Murdoch) about to transfer into the West End, I’m packing my bags.

But before I can skip town, I’ve one more professional engagement: the press launch of series two of the BBC drama Doctor Foster, which we finished filming at Christmas. I’ve now seen the final cut of all five episodes, and I’m excited to share it with an audience. There’s no substitute for seeing other people’s reactions at first hand, especially with a show that got people talking so much first time around, and it’s electric to sit in a cinema full of expectant journalists and commentators and feel the room respond. Nothing beats this: to put so much into making a thing and then experience an audience’s unmediated, reflexive reaction. When it goes well, you feel that you’ve shared something, that you’ve all recognised something together about how things are. It’s a unifying feeling. A sort of bond.

Cheating spouses

Handling the interviews has been tricky, when there’s so little one can say without giving the plot away. (The first series began with Suranne Jones’s character Gemma, a GP, suspecting her husband Simon of having an affair.) What’s more, lots of the questions invite moral judgements that I’ve tried my best to avoid; I always think it’s really important not to judge the characters I play from outside, but simply to work out how they feel about themselves, to zero in on their point of view. There’s a sort of moral bloodlust around this show: it’s extraordinary. People seem to want to hear that I’ve been pilloried in the street, or expect me to put distance between myself and my character, to hang him out to dry as a pariah.

While I’m not in the business of defending Simon Foster any more than I’m in the business of attacking him, I am intrigued by this queer mixture of sensationalism and prurience that seems to surface again and again.

Shock horror

Oddly enough, it’s something that comes up in Ink: many people have been surprised to find that, in a story about the re-launch of the Sun newspaper in 1969 as a buccaneering tabloid, it’s the proprietor who considers dropping anchor when the spirit of free enterprise threatens to set his moral compass spinning.

I’ve never given it much thought before, but I suppose that sensationalism relies on a fairly rigid worldview for its oxygen – the SHOCKERS! that scream at us in tabloid headlines are deviations from a conventional idea of the norm. But what’s behind the appetite for this sort of story? Do we tell tales of transgression to reinforce our collective boundaries or to challenge them?

For me there’s a close kinship between good journalism and good drama. I’m reminded of the words of John Galsworthy, who wrote Strife, the play I directed last summer, and who felt that the writer should aim “to set before the public no cut-and-dried codes, but the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted, by the dramatist’s outlook, set down without fear, favour, or prejudice, leaving the public to draw such poor moral as nature may afford”.

So when it comes to promoting the thing we’ve made, I’m faced with a real conundrum: on the one hand I want it to reach a wide audience, and I’m flattered that there’s an appetite to hear about my contribution to the process of making it; but on the other hand I think the really interesting thing about the work is contained in the work itself. I’m always struck, in art galleries, by how much more time people spend reading the notes next to the paintings than looking at the paintings themselves. I’m sure that’s the wrong way around.

Insouciant remake

En route to the airport the next morning I read that Doctor Foster is to be adapted into a new French version. It’s a cliché verging on racism, but I can’t help wondering whether the French will have a different attitude to a story about marital infidelity, and whether the tone of the press coverage will differ. I wonder, too, whether, in the home of Roland Barthes, there is as much space given to artists to talk about what they’ve made – in his 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author”, Barthes wrote that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”.

No stone unturned

Touring the villages of Gigondas, Sablet and Séguret later that evening, I’m struck by the provision of espaces culturels in seemingly every commune, however small. The French certainly give space to the work itself. But I also notice a sign warning of a chat lunatique, so decide to beat a hasty retreat. Arriving at the house where I’m staying, I’ve been told that the key will be under a flowerpot. Lifting each tub in turn, and finally a large flat stone by the door, I find a small scorpion, but no key. I’m writing this at a table less than a yard away so let’s hope there won’t be a sting in this tale.

Ink opens at the Duke of York Theatre, London, on 9 September. More details: almeida.co.uk